Mike Daisey took the shine from my Apple

Mike Daisey stole my Imac! Well, not literally maybe but the gifted monologuist has severely undercut the bliss I used to feel clicking and whooshing around the piece of electronic sculpture that is my new (ish) computer. What really bugs me is that I caught Daisey’s scathingly witty solo in JANUARY but I still can’t get his blistering critique of the company and its questionable workplace practices out of my mind. The upshot is Daisey’s delicious diatribe has become the worm in my Apple experience. I want a refund, people. Am I the only one? If you missed the show in its Berkeley Rep run, check out my review below.

Mike Daisey takes a bite out of the cult of Apple in “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.”

Daisey first established himself as the bard of the dot-com milieu with his breakthrough hit “21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com,” a tale of late ’90s cyber serfdom. Now he returns to his obsession with computers in a stinging indictment of the dark side of technology.

A wisecracking cross between Michael Moore and Spalding Gray, the rubber-faced performer fuses the high-voltage nerviness of stand-up with a muckraker’s sense of gonzo journalism in his latest one-man show, which runs in repertory with his “The Last Cargo Cult” through Feb. 27 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

A self-profesed Apple devotee, Daisey has worshipped at the temple of Mac since childhood and he weaves his devotion to the aesthetic genius of the company throughout this damning exposé. While the monologuist has yet to work out some of the bugs in this caustic two-hour rant, and it doesn’t revel in the same narrative richness as “Great Men of Genius,” it’s still one of the most trenchant pieces of political theater to come down the pike in ages.

In this freewheeling theatrical essay, he doesn’t just hold Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ feet to the fire. He doesn’t just question the morality of capitalism. He forces theatergoers to take a hard look at the glowing screens in their pockets and ask where they came from and at what cost.

Only a true believer, a man who fieldstrips his MacBook Pro down to its 43 components parts to unwind, could be this shocked and heartbroken to find that the gadgets he adores, those glossy pieces of electronic sculpture known as the iPad and the iPhone, might have been produced under brutal working conditions in China. Eager to investigate for himself, Daisey traveled to Shenzhen, a city of 14 million people crammed together under a “poisoned silver sky,” at a time when workers were hurling themselves off the roof at Foxconn, one of Apple’s key manufacturers.

American journalists warned him that no one in the high-tech hub would talk to him, but he found himself deluged with hair-raising tales of 12-year-olds cranking out parts on the assembly line, a man dying after a 32-hour shift and employees packed into dormitories like cattle. While he had always imagined computers being assembled by robots in pristine high-tech bubbles, instead he found human beings worked to the bone in special economic “free zones.”

At heart Daisey felt betrayed, not only by Apple, whose products are so beautiful he couldn’t imagine them being forged out of ugliness, but also by the technology press, which seems to care more about pings than people.

While Jobs is named in the title, his story merely frames the play’s debate about the macro issues of global capitalism. In fact, Daisey needs to smooth out the, shall we say, interface between the anecdotes about the Silicon Valley titan, most of which aren’t that engrossing, and the play’s deconstruction of consumerism.

For the record, there is no real mention of Jobs’ health in the show, but that omission is not jarring because the play really isn’t about one man’s journey. It’s about the electronics revolution as a force for social change, good and bad.

What makes Daisey so addictive as a performer is his ability to fuse snarkiness with sociological insight. He has a gift for lacerating self-exposure that also touches the pulse of the culture. He reveals his foibles at length (and indeed this show may be a tad too long) to illuminate our collective blind spots. This time, it’s our fetish for high-tech toys.

As an alpha geek who streams Apple keynote speeches while live blogging in his underwear, he knows that the lust for technology is a powerful aphrodisiac for many of us. He understands the sexiness of “a laptop so thin you could slice a sandwich with it.” An early adopter, he also feels the tug of nostalgia for dot-matrix printers so loud they shook the whole house and those terrifying unhappy Mac faces. Good times.

If there are times his nerdiness goes overboard (the rise and fall of the Newton Message Pad gets treated as a creation myth), there is no place in the world more forgiving of techno-babble than the valley. Certainly there is nowhere in the world where Daisey’s call to arms hits closer to home.